I finally put some of our songs up... only four so far, but more will be added within the next coupla days... any feedback of any type is appreciated... the link is in my sig (you have to click on "music" once you're there)... check em out!
the first two songs wer my favourite the others a bit different you guys are great but the songs are short and odly structured, thats the only thing i think you could work on. though the style works for my ears
yeah, the goal (I think, lol) is to have a whole ton of songs in a bunch of different (yet sometimes similar) styles and weave them together almost like a dj would. We do have some longer songs, but most are unfinished and awaiting for the vocals to be laid down, or some other pain in the ass editing to be done. Two of them will be going up tonight once I make it home, though... And as far as mall chicks and barking trendy, yeah, they're quite a bit different if you don't listen to much electronica, especially mall chicks... I'll be extremely surprised if anyone on this forum likes em, to be honest Thanks for listening, and I appreciate the feedback!
fulmah, that's some powerful stuff man! I went straight for Mall Chicks & Barking Trendy, because I typically like the "different" stuff. Impressive. It's like where David Bowie would be today had he continued in the direction of "Earthling" (my fave album of his). Anyway, I've gotta pick your brains now on the technical side... That's some insane compression you got on Mall Chicks. INsane. Like 0dB to -60dB and back again in the blink of an eye. What are you using to master your tracks? The drums on all tracks are great, too. Is it live or sampled? If it's sampled, what are you using? I want those drums!!! And lastly, how do you process your vox? Your stuff is very well produced and creatively mixed. I really liked it, which is odd, because it's nothing like the stuff I usually listen to.
hehe... I'm a techie so I could get really indepth with this; if you want more specifics just let me know and I'll send ya a pm, but basically.... we use fruityloops studio to record and sequence everything, and master within soundforge. we use a couple of different vst compressors on each instrument, initially... PSP makes several tailored to different specs (mixbass, mixpressor, mixtreble, mixsaturator), but the super sick compression you noticed is the Waves L3 Multimaximizer... it rules if you don't overcook it The drums were built from samples. We programmed alot of drum and bass over the last few years so it's cakework for us to do now. Take a sampled loop, slice it up into individual hits, and rewrite a whole slew of patterns, then put it all together. We almost always use Izotope Trash to add a little distortion, then compress with the L3, then add reverb with the Waves IR-1 (an amazing reverb that can emulate the lexicon 480L... it even has decent plates!). vox are processed with a couple of parametric eq's, Antares Tube (or Trash), any number of filters/delays we might use if it fits the track (Ohmboyz Delay, Predatohm, Antares Filter, and the PSP Nitro are our favorites), the L3, and the IR-1 is usually at the end of the chain. Anyways, yeah; I think that's about it! Again, if you want to know more about a specific track or anything, let me know... and many thanks for checking them out
Man you really know your crap. I have the Waves L3, but like most n00bs, I don't know how to use it right. Everything ends up sounding like a Def Leppard tune... big, muddy sound w/ no dynamics. I'd love to get the kind of precision & definition you got in Mall Chicks. Of course, it doesn't help that I have the EQ IQ of a moron. Do you learn this stuff from books or what?
Yeah, how it’s eq’d before it goes through the compressor is very important! That “Def Leopard sound” is probably just too much midrange being brought out. Subtractive eq is your friend! Having nice monitors also helps… like if you can actually hear (and feel) how big the bass is in mall chicks, you have some decent speakers, lol We’re currently discussing creating a “home recording” type of forum as a component to the site we’re creating for the band, but until that takes shape, this should cover any question you could possibly think of: http://www.dogsonacid.com/showthread.php?threadid=257992&cache=0 just look at that list and tell me it's not hehe
Spaceduck, Fulmah and I are working on these together. I used to share your anxiety with regard to getting a good sound quality. The best advice I could possibly give is as follows: 1. Get a good monitoring system. Regular speakers are simply not going to give you a neutral sound without eq coloration. 2. The most important tools you can have are already at your disposal: your ears and your brain. Remember that some of the best music ever made was crappily recorded/produced. A good idea will shine through the most horribly recorded song. Case in point: early Guided By Voices (if you have not heard Robert Pollard's work, I strongly recommend looking into his stuff a.s.a.p.). 3. Rather than relying too much on gear, find a few things (plug-ins etc.) that you like and learn everything you can about them. Limitations enhance creativity. Most engineers/producers are not good writers of songs. Since we are all on a low budget, we are having to do everything for ourselves these days. Let the big music industry morons obsess over quality. A good song is a good song is a good song. Almost every thing on the radio has "good" sound quality these days, but no real craftsmanship in terms of songwriting/lyrics. 4. Remember that most great music was recorded with very few options and variations. Guitar/bass/drums...maybe an organ or keyboard if the artist was lucky. Today we have too many options at our disposal, which is why a lot of the music out there sounds so crappy. You shouldn't put 84 tracks on a song if it doesn't need it! Less is usually more than enough. 5. Always do what you want with your music, and do not tailor it to a specific genre or listening audience. If you play your stuff to musicians you admire, there is a good chance they will not like it! They will be too busy being immersed in what they are going after to give your material a fair shake. If you are making music to appeal to a specific audience you must be prepared to lose that audience the minute you outgrow their listening interests. Not a good scenario IMHO. 6. Be careful with EQ, compression, FX, and normalization. These can suck the air right out of your recording if you overdo anything. With eq, it is generally better to cut frequencies that are conflicting than to boost frequencies to make a part stand out. Most fx are worthless IMHO (usually a lame way to "spruce up" a part that isn't very good to begin with). Compression can squash the energy out of any part extremely quickly, particularly on drums. Normalization will reduce the peaks in the waveform, which means you will have a wall of sound with no dynamics whatsoever. I think it's ok to let the listener turn up the stereo. Music is composed of waves with peaks and valleys, not walls of sound which don't fluctuate. The reason most modern records don't sound as interesting is because they have normalized the waveform to death in the mastering process. A good way to actually see this is to take a modern recording versus one from the sixties or seventies and look at the waveform in a wave editor. The modern recording might sound "bigger" and be louder, but the older recording will usually sound better IMHO. 7. Most of your great drum sounds can be sampled from 70's records. Most authentic reggae records have a drum roll at the beginning of the song. You can slice the drum roll and get great snares, toms, and kicks that will not need much in the way of additional processing. This will almost always sound better than your industry standard drum loops. 8. Listen to the Beatles!! Hope this helps. It has taken me a while to arrive at these conclusions, and the biggest advice I can give is to have fun and trust yourself. The more you measure your work against someone else's that you admire, the more you are killing the spirit of your idea as it is unfolding itself before you. Songs are things--they want to be written, and if you pay attention to them, they will tell you how they want to be! I would love to hear what you are up to! Good luck and thanks for the responses.
Finally, a pro gives it to me straight in language I can understand. Thanks a million! Btw, I never intended to hijack this thread and turn it into a Recording 101 class... I'm sure you know the whole point is that I think your material is so good I want to know exactly how you did it. :H 1. "Get a good monitoring system." I don't have any monitors at all. Everything is via headphones. Um... I take it that's a bad thing... 2. "A good idea will shine through the most horribly recorded song." Thanks for that important reminder. It's easy to fall into the trap of comparing myself to others. Like, "Man, my bass doesn't sound as crisp as Flea's" or "I wanted a Peter Gabriel-ish vocal effect" or "Damn, why can't my drums sound as good as Muse Chaser's?" 3 & 4. "You shouldn't put 84 tracks on a song if it doesn't need it!" Ummm.... oops... Luckily, my computer crashes after about 80. 5. "Always do what you want with your music, and do not tailor it to a specific genre or listening audience." It shows in your music. Anytime a band has the balls to say "this is our style, like it or not," I always like it. I'm sure that's the same opinion shared by my listening audience ...or listening audient. Thanks, mom. 6. "Be careful with EQ, compression, FX, and normalization." I hear ya. But at the same time, I know the mastering job can make or break a song (commercially speaking). Ever hear a song or an album that's really great, but the levels & quality are so awful you can't bear it? While others songs plain suck, but they're so well produced that you can't help listening (Britney Spears ...er, so I've been told). Today this phenomenon is very pronounced, because the "industry standard" is so high. Man, I'd love to be back in the 60s & 70s when recording quality sucked all around, and so it wasn't really an issue. Pan the drums hard left, pan the guitar hard right, and call it a day. The music will speak for itself. And it did. *sigh* 7. "Most of your great drum sounds can be sampled from 70's records." I'll have to try that. IMHO a good groove is at least 75% of the song. (I can listen to that "Barking Trendy" groove for hours.) All that from slicing & dicing 70s reggae fills? 8. "Listen to the Beatles!!" No joke! I can base my entire career around "Strawberry Fields Forever". Ever notice how that song starts in Em and ends in Ebm ...with no key changes? Go figure how they did that. Beatles rule. Hey man, this really did help. Also I'll be reading up on the dogsonacid site--exactly the stuff I've been looking for. Hope you don't mind if I lurk around your site & pester you occasionally! And you guys'll be the first to know when I finally beat my mixes into submission. Last question: do you guys put on a live show? Coming to NYC in the near future?
just as an fyi, the other half of musechaser actually wrote my last post... he's better at putting this stuff to words; unfortunately tho, he hasn't quite figured out signing me out first and logging in (haha... just pickin johnny!) I definitely don't mind doing a recording 101... it's fun, plus I remember stuff... The more people who learn that you can get quite good quality recordings from a radioshack mic (no joke, lol… we haven’t got off our asses yet to get a nice condenser) and a home pc, the better…. maybe. Having good speakers is essential… it’s possible to map out what’s going on in the headphones, but the spatiality is a big issue. The mix often sounds great in them, but play it on a stereo and you can’t hear the rhythm guitar, or the vox, and it sounded so great in the cans! The recording quality thing doesn’t impress me much anymore. “Free as a Bird” by the Beatles… which one do you like more, the fully fleshed version on the anthology, or the demo version that sounds like John recorded over an answering machine? I know what you mean tho, crap bands sometimes sound so good. That “These are the Breaks” thread on DOA has a ton of those old breaks. The most sampled break ever is James Brown’s “The Funky Drummer.” You can rewrite the piss out of that thing. We took a different approach on Barking Trendy… we layered snares and kicks together to get em big, and there’s a whole other break running over the chorus (with the cymbals). The main drums were loops a studio drummer made and gave away, recorded as clean as possible. We fucked them all up. We’ve been discussing a live show. It’s an ongoing debate on how to pull it off. Neither of us relishes working with other people too much, hauling drums and cabinets and all that crap around. Haggling with the soundman that yes, a laptop can be plugged into the pa and won’t blow your speakers. It’s nice playing live, but is it worth touring left and right to get exposure, or find another way to get exposure, then start touring? The second approach sounds more appealing.
..and this is "Johnny," who can't remember his login and is greedy enough to speak for Fulmah as Fulmah! Yeah headphones probably won't cut it. You can get decent studio-quality monitors for pretty cheap these days (M-Audio makes really good desktop PC monitors for around $300. We are using a pair right now). We dream of playing a place like NYC!! We are just getting off the ground as far as writing and recording. Touring is off in the distance somewhere down the road. I agree about the beat being essential to good music. You might try this: go through some songs and find some drum sounds you like, isolate each drum (snare, kick, etc.) in your wave editor, cut it out as an individual slice, then you will have a kit to use over and over again when you want some cool drum sounds. Programming drums can take some time at first. There is a learning curve as far as using your sequencing software to the point where you feel comfortable and satisfied with your drums, but stick with it! If you can think like a drummer, then you can program a part that you will be happy with. You can start with your kick. Just place the kicks where you feel they need to be in the song, then go in and do your snares. After you have the "boom bap" put down in a way that sounds good to your ears, you can go in and place your toms, hats, cymbals, etc. Your kick and snare will always be your foundation no matter what else you have going on. That DOA site has loads of really good drum breaks from the 70's. If you poke around the site, you will find downloads for the breaks. Agree with you about Strawberry fields being incredible. They actually did two versions of the song and pasted them together. The second part of the song was slowed down to make it gel with the first part, which is why the key changes. Most musicians would tell you couldn't do that if they were in a studio and you suggested it, but the Beatles trusted their instincts and did it anyway. Which is why they are the greatest!! We are still catching up to their ideas and innovations 40 years later. I'd love to hear what you are working on, Spaceduck. It seems like you are just getting to grips with using your music software. I can tell you that once you start to know how to do what you want in your software environment, things will really take off for you and you will be able to concentrate on the ideas. Any software that will let you do beat slicing is the way to go for drums.
Haha, I'm not sure which Fulmah I'm talkin to... o well... I'm taking note of all your drum suggestions. Funny, the slice-n-dice method you're describing sounds like what I tried once, but my software wasn't really designed for that (Sonar 1.0). The part ended up sounding too choppy & drum-machiney, because I didn't have enough control over volume & dynamics (so every snare hit sounded too perfect, etc). One thing about yall's drums is that it sounds smooth & human, like it was played straight thru. I think you mentioned adding a hint of distortion among other things... does that help blend the parts together? Monitors: ok, you've convinced me to get some. I'm relieved to hear I won't have to sell my car to afford a set. Oddly enough, last night my dog sat on my headphones and busted them. (Coincidence? Hmm... she's been spending an awful lot of time reading your posts...) You guys would sound awesome live. But playing live is more for fun than it is for promotion, these days. I bet you've got a pretty decent buzz going just by word of mouth & the internet. My last band wasted too much time with the live gigs, and in the end we had nothing to show for it. In NYC it's real easy to disappear into oblivion. By the time we got around to recording, we were so burned out & hating each others guts. lol. Sorta like the Beatles last days ...um, except we sucked. So anyway, that's why I'm trying to learn the studio side now. Like you said, Speakin of the Beatles, that's so cool about Strawberry Fields. I always figured it was something like that. Two parts accidentally recorded in the wrong key or something. That's one song you CAN'T play along with, unless you're pretty quick with a capo. Thanks again for the tips & inspiration. I'll be working at it over the next few weeks, and I'll report back as soon as I have something worth listening to!
I don't know if Sonar 1.0 will do it, but the new version of sonar will. You'd have to insert something called a "groove clip." I found this that explains how to do it: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Mar02/articles/sonarnotes0302.asp It looks a little complicated, but once you start messing with it, you'll recognize the potential. Any hit in a loop can be placed wherever you want it, so you could load up the first measure of Zepplin's "When the Levee Breaks" for example, and make a whole variety of patterns from it. Bonham never played it that way, but it'll sure sound real because, well, it is. or was. or something. And yeah, you could put distortion on that, maybe some ring modulation, and get this warped twisted industrial type beat and suddenly, it's not Bonham anymore. Purists' hate this. With a passion. It's kinda hilarious.
